michael k. wilkinson, photographs of architecture &

interiors

fourteenth street archives

Fourteenth Street NW in the District has always been a center of urban change and development. In the 1920s, at the dawn of the automobile age, developers built long blocks lined with large warehouse-type buildings where autos were sold and serviced. In 1968, the street was ravaged in the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. For decades, it languished. Then, the coming of the Green Line ushered a whole new era of development, starting around U Street in the early 1990s and spreading down to Logan Circle and up to Columbia Heights in the following decades. Most of these photographs are from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, when U Street had become a destination but Logan Circle and Columbia Heights were still fairly raw.